Although it has gone largely unnoticed--and perhaps because it went largely unnoticed--a public option did end up in the reconciliation bill. It is a public option for student loans, however:
The student aid initiative, which House Democrats attached to their final amendments to the health-care bill, would overhaul the student loan industry, eliminating a $60 billion program that supports private student loans with federal subsidies and replacing it with government lending to students. The House amendments will now go to the Senate.
By ending the subsidies and effectively eliminating the middleman, the student loan bill would generate $61 billion in savings over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
This is exactly what we wanted for the health care bill. Instead of just subsidizing the purchase of private insurance, cut out the middleman and have the government sell insurance directly. It would save a ton of money, and reduce the cost of the insurnace.
Hell, for health reform, we only wanted a public option like that in addition to, and as one alternative to, providing subsidies to purchasing private insurance. The plan was never to just eliminate the subsidies to purchase private insurance at all. The health reform public option was a smaller ask.
But, it didn't happen. Part of me thinks that it didn't happen explicitly because all the dirty frakking hippies were the ones pushing for a public health insurance option. And, if we had been pushing for this student loan public option, it probably would have been defeated, too.
Because that's how politics works: defeat the dirty hippies, no matter what they are asking for, simply for the sake of saying you defeated the dirty hippies. Thus, you can claim victory over the dirty hippies, and show you stoof up to their freakishness. Then, tell everyone that if you didn't defeat the dirty hippies, Democrats would lose everything. From the leadership to the rank and file, the Democratic ecosystem is rife with that belief.
That a public option ended up in the reconciliation bill, just not the public option we were looking for, is as clear proof as there can be that the health reform public option campaign was winnable. But, perhaps what killed it was that the DFH's were the ones asking for it.
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